


Christmas in Connecticut (Where Nothing is What it Seems)

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Awkwardness, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Family Drama, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Hallmark Channel Original Movies as Life Lessons, Multi, Self-Esteem Issues, Stereotypes, Stereotypical Westchester, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 14:46:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13250454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: Archie finally bows to family pressure and invites Parker and Hardison to Westchester for Christmas.  Parker wants to do right by her old mentor, and in the process turns to the most unlikely of teaching tools.





	Christmas in Connecticut (Where Nothing is What it Seems)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [babythor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/babythor/gifts).



> Prompt #2. Parker and Hardison have Christmas with Archie and his family, with all the awkwardness that implies.
> 
> Well, I didn't actually get them to Christmas, but I hope you enjoy the prep work! Thank you very much for playing with us this year, and I hope you had as much fun participating as we did reading your work.

Christmas. In Westchester.

“We had Thanksgiving with your family…” But Hardison was pretty sure he hadn’t looked as worried at the prospect of Parker meeting Nana as Parker currently did at the idea of them having a traditional New England Christmas.

“I love it,” he said, smiling softly at her and pulling her into a hug. She came into his arms almost too easily, burying her face against his chest. “And hey – Archie already likes me, right?” He heard Parker sniff; hoping she hadn’t actually given into tears yet he pulled back and ducked just enough for their eyes to meet. “He does like me, doesn’t he? Parker, you would tell me if this was some plan for your mentor to get rid of me, right?”

That got a smile out of her, as he intended. “He likes you,” she said. “And I’m sure the real family’s going to like you.” Her silent _”because they sure won’t like me”_ suddenly hung so heavily in the air she might as well have said the words out loud, and it was at that moment Hardison realized his life goal was to punch everyone who had ever laid claim to the thief’s trust only to turn on her.

_Maybe I can get Eliot to help. Or at least give me pointers._

First though, he was going to talk to Archie.

“Alec, I promise you, this was not my idea.” Hardison was only slightly mollified that the elderly Englishman seemed almost as distressed as Parker at the possibility of his two worlds finally colliding. “Unfortunately ever since I decided to come clean about Parker, Rachel and Ellen haven’t seen fit to let the subject drop.”

“Not your finest hour, sir,” Hardison couldn’t stop himself. As presumably the only parental figure Parker had, he’d tried his hardest to be respectful of the man – even at the cost of Chaos openly mocking him (although seeing the terror in the other hacker’s eyes when Archie had threatened him with one of his special canes had been a thing of beauty). This, though – he couldn’t see any way for Parker to come through what this was turning into unscathed.

“Blame your so-called mastermind,” Archie snapped. “When we did the Wakefield job, he took me to task for never claiming Parker as my ‘real daughter’ and giving her a chance to grow up something closer to normal. I guess it bothered me more than I realized at the time – and I thought Parker would appreciate not being my dirty little secret anymore!”

 _It’s a generational thing. It has to be._ Otherwise Hardison was going to have to face the fact that Archie had never really understood what he ‘unleashed on the world’, and that definitely didn’t get them past the problem of Christmas. “Tell me,” he said finally, bowing his head and pinching the bridge of his nose. “Do they at least know that I’m black?”  
*******************************************  
After surfing through seven hundred channels – twice – Parker settled on the Hallmark Channel’s marathon of “Holiday Classics”. She didn’t recognize any of the titles advertised, but they all at least looked like she imagined Archie’s family when they celebrated Christmas. One of them was even called “Christmas in Connecticut”, and she put a star beside that one.

“What are you even watching?” Parker glanced up to see Eliot standing in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest as he scowled at the television.

She checked the list she’d made. “’A Puppy for Christmas’. Christmas seems to be a big time for puppies. I guess that’s fair – you don’t see a lot of puppies at Halloween.” Halloween was more of a time for cats, she’d figured out.

Still clearly confused, Eliot came further into the room. “Okay, _why_ are you watching ‘A Puppy for Christmas’? I swear my blood sugar is up just from being within five hundred yards of that crap!”

“Archie’s real family invited me and Hardison for Christmas,” she admitted, trying hard not to let any of the panic currently tightening her chest leak out. If the look on Eliot’s face now was any indication, she’d only been marginally successful. “I figured if I did my homework, treated it like a con, then maybe it wouldn’t be a horrible disaster and everybody wouldn’t end up mad at me.”

She tensed, seeing a flash of anger cross the hitter’s expression, but just as quickly it passed and she decided it must have been about something else. “Parker, Hardison’s not going to be mad at you. No matter what happens.”

“I don’t want Archie to be mad at me either,” she admitted. “He took a big chance telling them about me – I don’t want him to be sorry he did it.” The ironic thing about the whole mess was that she’d never really thought about Archie as a potential father while she was growing up. Fathers were bad people – they drank, they yelled and hit and did…well, other things. Archie was none of those things, so it was only after she was grown and had a different frame of reference that Parker began to understand what had been right in her reach had she known enough to grab for it.

Coming forward, Eliot took a seat on the couch next to her. “I seriously don’t think Archie’s going to be mad at you,” he said, “and if he wasn’t ready to face lying to his family about you he wouldn’t have said anything in the first place.”

Parker found herself wondering about Eliot. She knew that potentially barring Sophie he’d probably had the closest to a normal upbringing of any of them. “What was Christmas like for your family?”

She was more grateful than she had words to express that Eliot seemed to be willing to answer her question, instead of brushing her off as he tended to do when the subject of families came up. “Pretty cool,” he admitted. “My mom and my aunt would spend a week cooking and baking, and any time you went through the kitchen there was a bowl of something you could snack on. More food than we typically saw in a month.”

“Was there snow?” Parker asked. She’d never really lost the expectation that proper Christmases had snow – but Eliot shrugged.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Didn’t really matter, because we spent almost all our time outside anyway.” He shifted into a more comfortable position. “Listen Parker – I think this is a good idea here, because yes, Archie’s family probably does do Christmas more like the movies than not. Your problem isn’t going to be what to do or how to act, though.”

 _Great,_ Parker thought. She was glad Eliot was in the mood to offer advice, but she really had thought she’d at least figured that part out. “What?” she asked.

“Do you understand what they think when Archie refers to you as his daughter?”

 _Oh…_  
*************************************  
“Has Archie finally lost it?”

All Hardison could do was throw up his hands and laugh. “I wish I knew, man. He sounds like he’s just trying to make things right, but hearing him talk it’s like he suddenly doesn’t understand Parker at all!”

Eliot indicated the living room. “You know she’s in there binge-watching the Hallmark Channel? Trying to research what this trip is going to be like.”

After the initial shock had passed, Hardison had to allow for the subtle genius of the move. “You know…” he began, and Eliot rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, I already told her. Are you in any way prepared for this, Hardison? You know this isn’t gonna be like Thanksgiving. Your Nana at least knows what you do, even if she doesn’t approve.”

Hardison could tell Eliot’s frustration was tinged with worry, which under the circumstances he had to admit was entirely justified. “Nana also wasn’t trying to deal with the idea of Parker as some kind of missing biological link. Archie’s family lives in Westchester, Eliot. Westchester. I probably know how bad this is likely to go better than you do.”

He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the realization Eliot had been so focused on Parker that he’d completely missed the potential for drama in the idea of Parker and Hardison together. “You want help explaining that to her?”

“Nah,” Hardison said, getting to his feet and stretching. “One of the best parts about dealing with those kinds of people is that they can’t come at me openly because of their manners. Long as they don’t come at me openly I control the horizontal and the vertical.”

“All right then,” Eliot conceded. “If you’re sure.”  
***********************  
Eliot made everyone’s favorite foods for dinner, and he and Hardison joined Parker in time for the airing of “Christmas in Connecticut” – usual rules about eating in front of the television being suspended for the night. Parker was relieved to have them both – the movies all seemed to follow a pattern, and she was pretty sure she understood the pattern, but she desperately wanted to know what it was about Connecticut that made it special enough for its own Christmas movie.

This one was definitely trying to sell the ‘magic of Christmas’ angle hard – a woman who played a chef on television had to pretend to be one in real life in order to help a forest ranger who had lost his home in a fire. It was obvious to Parker, especially after eight hours of binging on this particular type of story, that the goal was for the man and woman to fall in love, and after getting past his annoyance at being able to tell right off that the woman wasn’t supposed to be a real chef, Eliot confirmed as much.

“She’s still lying to him though,” Parker pointed out.

“He’s going to forgive her,” Hardison assured her. “That’s part of what Christmas is supposed to be about – forgiving people.” He paused, considering something, then said in a softer voice. “In the movies, at any rate.”

Parker turned her attention back to the movie, trying to look at ‘Elizabeth’ and ‘Jefferson’s’ relationship through that filter and then applying it to her own situation with Archie. “Archie isn’t lying to me,” she said finally, choosing each word carefully and trusting her boys to tell her if she was heading in the wrong direction. “He was lying to the real family. If Christmas is about forgiving people, he must be hoping they’ll forgive him.”

“He might be hoping you’ll forgive him,” Eliot pointed out. “Remember the chewing out Nate gave him after the Wakefield job?”

Parker did remember. Archie had told her about it, in a sort of stumbling way as they said their good-byes, and while she’d shared the gist of the conversation with Hardison and Eliot, she’d never told them about the words _she’d_ had with Nate shortly afterwards. 

_“What would you have done if I’d tried to steal your wallet instead of Archie’s? Would you have taken me home? Introduced me to Maggie? Let me play with Sam?”_

Nate’s response at the time had been far from satisfactory. “Real families are hard,” Parker pouted, frustration at the memory sending her reaching for one of the star shaped cookies Eliot had brought out. “And I still don’t understand what’s supposed to be so special about Connecticut and Christmas anyway!”  
**********************************  
Hardison risked a glance at Eliot, hoping against hope that the hitter would be willing to take the lead on this one.

 _Thanks for nothing,_ he grumbled internally as Eliot clearly conveyed without words that ‘this one’ was going to be all his.

Hardison hadn’t lied when he’d told Eliot he was confident in his ability to get himself through the trip unscathed. He was still hoping Archie’s ‘real family’ would be better than his own pre-conceived notions seemed to be willing to allow them to be, but when all was said and done he didn’t give a fat rat’s backside what people like that thought of him.

 _Parker, on the other hand…_ If things went as pear-shaped for Parker as he could see them going, best case scenario Archie ended up on the outs with his ‘real family’ and Parker decided it was her fault.

Worst case scenario, somebody would get stabbed, and right now Hardison wasn’t sure which he was rooting for.

“I think it’s less about Connecticut,” he said finally, “and more about the holiday. Connecticut is a state where Christmas time typically looks like the Christmas everybody dreams about, so people spend a lot of time trying to live up to that idea.” Both Parker and Eliot were watching him now, and Hardison thought he could see the hint of a smile on Eliot’s face, so he pushed forward a little more.

“Maybe we need to focus less on how to get Archie’s family to like you and more on how to give them somebody we know they’ll like.”

“You did say you were trying to approach this like a job,” Eliot said, nodding. “Why not just play the whole trip as a con?”

Feeling some of the tension leach out of his body, Hardison added, “A con where we’re giving the mark something they’ll like, instead of figuring out how to take something away.”

Parker looked doubtful. “Lying to families is supposed to be bad. You guys both said…”

Hardison grinned at her, pulling her into a one-armed hug. “They’re not your family though, are they?”

Reaching across, Eliot ruffled her hair. “And when you pull off this con, your real family will have a fun Christmas waiting for you right here.”

Hardison watched as Parker considered the possibility of them still getting to celebrate Christmas with Eliot, and decided that it was worth anything Archie’s ‘real family’ might try and throw at her. “All the trimmings?” she asked, her blue eyes hopeful.

Grinning at both of them now, Eliot nodded. “You’ll even get snow if I can manage it.”


End file.
